Lainey Wilson won the Best Country Album on music’s biggest night
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
It didn’t take long during a Grammy speech for a winner to recognize her rural and farming roots.
“I am from a farming community in northeast Louisiana, a little town of 200 people, and I’m a fifth-generation farmer’s daughter, and I would consider myself a farmer too,” Lainey Wilson said while accepting the Best Country Album award for Bell Bottom Country. “And everybody that I surround myself with, I think they’re farmers too, but they’re story farmers.”
Wilson grew up on her family’s farm in Baskin, La., where her father, Brian, raised corn, wheat, and oats. Her mother, Michelle, worked as a schoolteacher. She also has an older sister named Janna.
And like many farm kids, spending time with her dad meant putting in the same hours on the farm her father did.
“He put us to work,” Wilson told the Biscuits and Jam Podcast in November 2022. “A lot of the time, if we wanted to spend time with him, we had to go out to the field and ride the tractor with him.”
In addition, her parents have served as inspiration for her songs.
Her song, Grease, pays tribute to her mother saying, “now we’re cooking with grease.” And Those Boots (Deddy’s Song) is about helping her dad get ready for work by pulling his blue jeans down over the top of his boots.
During her Grammy acceptance speech, Wilson connected farming to her music career.
It takes time and patience to have a good harvest, she said.
“It's about getting up every single day and planting those seeds and watering them and watching them grow,” she told her peers in the music industry. “And sometimes when you find the right farming community, you can have a harvest of a lifetime, and I truly believe that and I think that's exactly what this is tonight."